Pool Water: Volume Three

The world is perilous, and the sea of officialdom rises and falls. Water takes no constant shape; clarity and turbidity depend on the heart. History is a mirror that reveals the loyal and the treacherous!

In the third month of the forty-seventh year of the Wanli era of the Ming dynasty, the palace examinations were underway. Nurhaci of Jianzhou inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ming army at Sarhu in Liaodong, shaking the court and the country. Zhang Yu, a candidate from Licheng, Shandong, traveled to the capital for the metropolitan examination and placed second in the highest tier. When the top candidate, Zhuang Jichang, was found to have made an error in his submitted examination paper, Zhang Yu was exceptionally appointed an editor at the Hanlin Academy. Later, Zhang Yu unexpectedly meets two women in the capital and, before he knows it, becomes entangled in a web of intrigue...

This is a historical novel set in a partly fictionalized Ming and Qing era. Its protagonist is fictional.